Railways’ encroachment

The Pakistan Railways, like all the other state entities including the Pakistan Steel Mills and PIA, has been on a life-support machine for many years. It is massively underfunded and overstaffed for the number of trains it runs, and the freight service is all but dead. Thus, it needs every rupee of revenue it can lay hand on, and the monetisation of the chronic problem of encroachments may be a way of generating an income stream. The railways is a large landowner with 167,690 acres across the country, 2,612 acres of which are illegally encroached by ‘influentials’ and assorted government departments. There have been some titanic legal battles as the railways tries to get its land back, sometimes achieving success: it got back 3,000 acres in two phases since the Supreme Court took suo-motu notice in 2011.

Encroachment — the illegal occupation of land not owned by the encroacher — is a national curse. It is an insidious form of theft and often committed by parties that are themselves part of government and ‘big business’. With possession often transpiring to be nine points of the law, it is frequently difficult to dislodge encroachers, who will dodge and weave through the legal system to hold on to their illegal gains. Inadequate policing and a lack of cooperation by district administrations — which are in thrall to ‘influentials’ anyway — compounds the problem. The railways faces further difficulty as there is sometimes no resolution of its title to the land, which it claim to be its own, and various stay orders issued by the courts play into the hands of the encroachers as they halt the anti-encroachment drives that are periodically mounted. A report is to be submitted to the Speaker of the National Assembly, which will argue that the railways deserves “a reasonable income” from its encroached lands. Whilst this is not an ideal solution as it leaves the land in the hands of the encroachers, it may provide — if enforceable — an income for the cash-strapped railways. Weak legislation and corrupt administrations underpin the culture of encroachment; neither is likely to improve in the foreseeable future.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 10^th, 2014.

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